


electric love

by bananablue



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - High School, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Eating Disorders, F/F, Friends to Lovers, I Tried, Past Child Abuse, Trans Female Character, Trans!Harry, blame euphoria for this, cis!girl Zayn, ftm!Harry, i swear it gets better, it will make sense soon, sort of slow burn oops?, starts slow but it will pick up, zarry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24017821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananablue/pseuds/bananablue
Summary: after spending most of her summer in rehab, zayn comes home and meets harry, the new girl in town. addictions, friendships, heartbreaks, and more antics ensue. what else can you expect from teenage girls?au where zayn is a cis girl and harry is a transgender (male to female) girl
Relationships: Zayn Malik/Harry Styles
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	electric love

**Author's Note:**

> zayn's background story; enjoy luvs

Zayn was fifteen years old the first time she tried heroin. She considered it to be a pretty big feat considering how she was hanging out with drug dealers and addicts who had offered her heroin almost every day. She didn’t mean for it to happen - which, in retrospect, sounds pretty fucking stupid, but it was true. Sure, she’d come and smoke a blunt everyday with Zed, who’d been the one to first introduce her to weed when she was thirteen years old and already too cool for everyone, but she’d never in a million years thought that she would end up using heroin. It was one of those dirty drugs, as her mother liked to say, the ones that fucked people up permanently. 

The feeling was like nothing she could ever describe. It was how she first discovered that maybe she had a little bit of a pain kink (anyone who says they like the feeling of a needle pricking their skin most definitely has a pain kink because that shit hurts like a fucking bitch) and that she could feel absolutely nothing for a few moments. The first place she’d injected herself had been in the crook of her arm, a spot she could cover up easily with her shirts and sweaters. She’d been sitting in the corner of Zed’s living room, the boy’s hand guiding hers to make sure that she was actually going to inject herself with it because that shit was expensive and there was no way in hell Zayn was going to waste the heroin and put him at a loss. On the count of three, they’d both pressed down and the needle was pushing into her olive skin. Her jaw had gone almost slack, her eyes widened and her lips parted, unable to comprehend the feeling. It felt warm, like someone had taken hot water and injected her with it. It felt like someone had pinched her, which was probably just the feeling of the needle in her skin. It felt like someone had wrapped her up in their loving, strong arms, and god, was she fucked. It felt like everything she’d been craving, but at the same time, it felt like nothing. Nothing was moving, nothing was happening, and she fucking loved it. 

Zayn couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt nothing. 

-

Zayn Javadd Malik. What type of fucking name was Javadd? She was pretty sure she’d asked her mother that question, to which she got some bullshit answer that went something along the lines of ‘it’s a lovely family name and you should fucking respect it’ (spoiler: Zayn didn’t respect it). When asked how to pronounce it, Zayn almost always replied ‘Jade’ because that was ten thousand times better than the name she’d been given. Anything was better than anything her mother could ever give her. 

Zayn had been born when her mother was twenty two years old, and she swore she could feel the tension between herself and her mother even when she was in the womb. It wasn’t that the two of them hated each other - it was more like… a general displeasement with one another. Ever since she was a little girl, Zayn swore that her mother probably didn’t like her much, which sort of made sense to her because of the things Zayn did. She’d been five years old when she first started counting the number of atoms in the air out loud while they ate dinner, to which her mother almost immediately snapped at her to shut the hell up and eat her fucking spaghetti. It became evident to her mother that Zayn had something wrong with her - to put it nicely - after she found the girl crying in the bathroom because she hadn’t been kissed on the right cheek after the left, and it made her so uncomfortable that she’d had a full on meltdown. Weeks of testing and meetings with therapists and all sorts of mental health professionals ensued, and at the end of it all, five year old Zayn was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, general anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder and potentially, bipolar disorder. Her mother had chewed her out on the way home from the pharmacy, where they’d picked up all of Zayn’s medications, threatening her daughter that if this was all for show, she’d fuck her up. It was funny to look back on now, because who the fuck threatens a five year old girl who has so many fucking issues? It was beyond fucked up, but it was the best example of how Zayn’s relationship with her mother was.

-

Zayn was seventeen years old when she went to rehab. Just like she hadn’t meant to try heroin, she hadn’t tried to overdose. In fact, she thought she was being smart about it because she’d only filled the needle halfway up with heroin, which was definitely less than what she’d been doing. However, in her intoxicated state of mind, she’d sort of disregarded the fact that she was already high after snorting a line of ketamine and smoking a blunt with Zed. She’d gone home after getting high, and as soon as she was home, made her way right to her room, where she got out her needles, a spoon, a lighter, and a piece of aluminum foil which had the tar-like substance in it. She could get everything ready within a few, short minutes, and she’d been quite proud of herself for the ‘small’ amount of heroin in the needle, because she considered that to be progress towards sobering up in her fucked up state of mind. 

“Fucking hell,” Zayn mumbled as she pulled the sleeve of her black sweater up, a thin layer of sweat on her forehead as she sat on the floor, back against her bed as she looked at her skinny, tanned arm to see where she could inject herself. It was a week after school had got out for the summer, so she definitely didn’t need to be wearing a sweater, but with the track marks on her arms, she sort of had to cover them up at all times. She sat silently for a few minutes, sniffing hard before she looked down at her thighs, which were bare thanks to the shorts she was wearing. They were track free, and looked like they were almost inviting her to jab herself with the needle and get high, and she took them up on that offer. With a deep breath, Zayn was pressing the needle into her thigh, feeling that familiar, comforting sense of relief as she tilted her head back and laughed softly, licking her chapped lips as she smiled and shut her eyes.

When her mother found her, she was slumped against the side of the bed. Her mouth was open, with vomit in her hair and down the side of her neck and right arm. Her hands were limp but the needle was still in her hand, as if it was taunting her for overdosing. Her mother had screamed, dropping the bag of takeaway Chinese food she’d been holding, her breathing becoming frantic as she bent down to wake her daughter up, shaking the seventeen year old aggressively and yelling right in her face, but it did nothing. It was probably the first time in her life that she’d cried for her daughter, begging her to wake up and say something, but it was useless. It was only when the paramedics administered narcan through Zayn’s nose that she woke up, but even that wasn’t much of an improvement because she was still overdosing. 

-

Zayn honestly couldn’t remember much else of that day, or the next few days. It felt like a blur, with doctors and nurses coming in and out of her room, checking on her vitals and giving her warm blankets and ice chips to help her through her withdrawals (this was the longest she’d gone without hard drugs since she was fifteen, as fucked up as it sounded). Four days after overdosing, her mother was there to pick her up from the hospital, having come straight from the casino she worked at. Zayn should’ve realized something was up when the woman gave Zayn a cuddle and promised to pick her up her favorite food on the way - she hadn’t specified where because she was a smart woman and knew that if she told Zayn she was going to rehab, the girl would freak out on her. Zayn had been way too tired to care, instead just shrugging and following her mother out to the car after thanking her care team. 

Zayn spent six weeks in rehab. When she’d been dropped off, it had become clear that she wasn’t going to go in voluntarily, and after lunging at her mother while screaming obscenities, one of the nurses had grabbed her while another injected her with a sedative in the arm, and Zayn had almost immediately gone limp in the nurse’s arms. Once again, she couldn’t remember much thanks to the sedative. Rehab was a fucking bitch, though. She would remember that for the rest of her life. Six weeks of sitting and talking to a group of addicts, who all looked way worse than Zayn, talking to a therapist who wanted to know more about Zayn’s childhood, which Zayn just found invasive, and nurses encouraging Zayn to eat because she was ‘just bones’, as if that would motivate Zayn to eat the most disgusting food she’d ever had. After a torturous six weeks, she was discharged from the rehab facility and picked up by her mother, who looked almost scared of her daughter, which Zayn could honestly get used to. 

It was a wordless drive home, with Zayn sat in the passenger seat as her mom played all her favorite songs in an attempt to make Zayn talk about her experience. Zayn was silent, sitting with her hands in her lap as she wore a big gray shirt from the rehab with a pair of black ripped skinny jeans that her mother had been kind enough to bring so she didn’t have to wear the huge pair of sweatpants that were also from the rehab. One of Zayn’s favorite songs of all time came on, and as she heard the familiar guitar chords, she glanced out of the window to see a girl riding her bike with her long, bleached blonde hair left open. She had a small pink backpack on and was clearly wearing some sort of dress, because her legs were almost fully bare. Zayn turned properly to look at the girl, her dull eyes taking in the girl’s pale skin, which looked almost iridescent in the sunlight. 

"I want to know what love is, I want you to show me," her mother crooned along with Lou Gramm, a smile playing on her lips as Zayn stared at the girl.

The music surrounded Zayn as she looked out at the girl, who glanced over when she saw the car driving by. As stupid as it sounded, Zayn swore that their eyes locked and for a moment, she felt warm and comforted all over again. She looked at the girl intensely as the green eyed girl on the bike gave her a smile, dimple full in effect as she looked at Zayn. 

"I want to feel what love is, I know you can show me," her mother continued, and Zayn wanted to tell her mother to shut the fuck up so she could focus on the girl but she was honestly speechless for the first time in her life.

Zayn felt butterflies in her stomach when she saw the girl’s dimpled smile, and for a moment she couldn’t even be mad at herself for feeling something so stupid, because this girl was almost ethereal in her beauty. Her bleached, platinum colored hair almost matched how white her legs were. Her eyes were green, but not that typical emerald bullshit; they were the color of poison ivy, the color that authors used to describe the feeling of jealousy. Zayn could already tell that she was tall, with the way she was slightly hunched over and how long her legs were. 

Zayn felt like shit, and she was pretty sure she looked like it too, but this girl was looking at her in a way that made her feel so appreciated and validated. Her eyes settled on the girl’s dimple for a few moments before her mom stopped abruptly at a red light, making Zayn lean forward in her seat with the quick movement, and when she looked back up and out of the window, the green eyed girl was biking in a completely different direction. Zayn spoke her first words after leaving rehab, unable to help it as she sat back in the passenger seat of her mom’s old car, her eyes slightly lit up as she stared in the direction the girl had biked off in.

“Who the fuck was that?”

**Author's Note:**

> i swear it will pick up - bear with me as i sort of set up the background for the fic!


End file.
